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following my philosophy that a book is a blank train ticket and I prefer reviews that follow suit, I found Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built to be one of those where it really doesn’t matter who’s in it or what happens to them (or not). it’s a brain-wide open read. (heart-wide-open, too.)
what is A Psalm for the Wild-Built?
it’s hopepunk
the question isn’t really about how I found the book, but where it led me to. as I wrote in my book club post, I picked a book that “might leave us feeling better about humanity and the state of the world”.
the question then becomes whether I succeeded in my mission. according to reviews by V.H. Belvadi and Travis Bryant, yes; emphatically so. their write-ups on the book alone felt like balm for the soul. a “literary hug”, as V.H. put it, it sure was; one which indeed allows you to “believe in the inherent goodness of things”. hopepunk1 a term coined by fantasy author Alexandra Rowland in 2017 is entirely apt. it leaves you with a sense of hope that can’t be explained. only experienced. and that’s why it took time for me to live with that feeling. I couldn’t take to the page until I’d assimilated this strange new feeling in me that lingers long after a book has been marked ‘read’. A Psalm for the Wild-Built leaves you feeling hopeful.
momentarily suspending disbelief, you’re transported to a world in which robots are off doing their thing (which seems to be little more than feeding their special interests—is it weird that I closed the book wishing I was a robot 😆). humans… well, humans are kind. they have some sort of belief system that the book doesn’t do much worldbuilding on, focused instead on giving you the impetus to unfurl in yourself even the remotest of possibilities that perhaps, one day, we can all just get along. oh, and also — actually, most importantly — that there’s a world out there somewhere in which our own happiness is important to us on a societal scale. (the book touches on the theme of happiness as a central pillar.)
it’s also—here Travis classifies it best—“cozy solarpunk speculative cli-fi.”
it’s cosy sci-fi
cosy fiction’s been growing on me. I read myself to sleep which, as an insomniac, can be a slippery slope. happiest as a night owl, my brain doesn’t need an excuse to start firing neurons on all cylinders. it likes mental stimulation and is willing to sacrifice next-day-me in a heartbeat if it means we can think our way into more dopamine. recently, I started on (mostly—it’s clearly a huge thing over there) Japanese and Korean cosy fiction/magical realism. reading it is like a calming massage for the brain. A Psalm for the Wild-Built was definitely cosy. Chambers creates a world you can rest in—just as characters in that world visit a tea monk to rest their weary souls (which are, arguably, a lot less weary than our 2026-this-world versions!).
it’s solarpunk
while it’s not solarpunk in the slant of some other works I’ve read in the genre, it has a roundabout way of wrapping itself inside it. it wasn’t until I was this-minute old that it occurred to me that human society, in the book, might seem “primitive” in comparison to our hyper-connected world on our hyper-resource-tapped planet. Dex, the tea monk main character, gets around by way of an ox-bike wagon that serves as a double-decker tiny house built onto a bicycle frame. thermovoltaic roof coating and a small wind turbine power their life (including boiling the kettle when a community member visits their tea lounge, aka travelling café and mobile therapy clinic). but you don’t get the sense that this radically different lifestyle is, by any means, sacrificial. the inhabitants of that world simply have a different relationship to technology than we do. not because they’re “behind” us in their developmental epoch. to the contrary, they’re what one might call A.R., After Robots. or, as the book calls it, post Factory Age. there was an Awakening and a Parting Promise—this is best enjoyed by reading the book, so I won’t get into it—and now humans, instead of viewing robots as mere tools and labour for humanity to do with as they please, look to such resources as the sun, that giant fireball in the sky that, surprise, comes with a by-and-large daily dose of free energy.
it’s speculative
here I want to differentiate between the nature of the speculation. I finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built in tandem with Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. if one was oozing hope, the other had its picture on a can of grimdark, if the genre were to apply also to sci-fi. it’s as important to me to read existential horror as it is to walk away from a book feeling good. I yin-yang my reading all the time.
Dick’s work has to it a general sense of pervasive hopelessness experienced by morally grey characters who are victims to systemic cruelty and suffer bleak endings. that, by the way, is a compliment. channelling your own experience of reality into bleak speculative fiction that inspired screen adaptations the likes of Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, and Total Recall, that is art. speculation is an art. it doesn’t matter in which direction its wind may blow. PKD is a master, and on my bucket list is to read in my lifetime every single thing he ever published.
but works such as this by the pen of Becky Chambers are just as important for my brain to speculate inside as the places Philip shows us we don’t want to end up in. Chambers demonstrates to us how good it’ll feel to choose well. to choose wisely. there’s no inherent promise that all our problems will magically disappear (Dex, after all, wrestles throughout the book with happiness being elusive even when your life’s great). but it allows speculation also of the good. writing cooperative, ecologically sound futures is a necessary prerequisite for engineering them in reality. hopepunk says that choosing to care, to fight for community, and to retain your empathy in a broken world is a deliberate act of rebellion.
where does A Psalm for the Wild-Built take you?
wherever you want! as far as a TL;DR goes. what most stood out to me—in large part due to where I’m at in rewiring my lifestyle and how I think about living—was the invitation to lead a being-driven, rather than a purpose-driven, life. this came to the fore even more when I read subsequently Alan Bennett’s novella, The Uncommon Reader, a satirical work in which Queen Elizabeth II has Buckingham Palace up in arms due to her sudden falling in love with reading.
we are because we are. we might also be a someone, a role, a responsibility. many other somethings. but before all of that—and also after it all—we either are, or we aren’t. and being alive inevitably means to be. only death separates us from our beingness in this life2 as far as we know; then again, what do we know? very, very little. .
I’ve led myself down the garden path of “purpose” for as long as I can remember. getting off it is hard. I even named a whole odyssey after it. these books reminded me that the gilded cage of purpose also has a key you can use to free yourself. being is mandatory. purpose is optional. and being—so the little sage-who-knows-things growing inside me whispers—sells the best flavours of purpose inside its storehouses.
closely related was the idea that, while modern self-care often places the burden of healing squarely on those who are already exhausted, reimagining the world we’d like to live in also allows us to see our beingness in relation to that of others. creating sanctuary, ultimately, is as much a community act as is creating societal problems. caring for ourselves is, ultimately, caring for our communities. but we don’t have to be useful to anyone to deserve care. we cannot give from an empty cup, but we can boil the kettle for each other. and that’s the kind of community infrastructure I like mixed into some of my speculative fiction servings.
as for the rest of it, let’s be more like Mosscap and the other robots, and follow our curiosities wherever they may take us!